Israel News

An estimated 10,000 people took to the streets of Beit Shemesh, a community between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Tuesday night to protest the actions of ultra-Orthodox extremist activists who are terrorizing students in the city’s Orthodox girls school Orot.

Yitzhar, West Bank — “Revenge junction,” reads the graffiti scrawled on a road sign marking the turnoff to this mountaintop Jewish settlement. It is perhaps a telling welcome to a town and local yeshiva considered by Israel’s government as a nest of young, radical right-wing vigilantes.

In the week since an Israeli military base was attacked and Palestinians were stoned by dozens of settlement sympathizers, Israelis have been up in arms amid allegations of growing lawlessness among hard-line Jewish settlements and the smaller outposts.

The half-million middle-class Israelis who took to the streets calling for social justice last summer will be a force to reckon with in next year’s election even as some of the demanded changes are implemented.

That was the view of Manuel Trajtenberg, a Tel Aviv economist and chairman of a committee that released a 270-page report in September that he said “translated the clamor of the people into a language that government can do something about.”

Chanukah is almost upon us, the beloved Festival of Lights, that special weeklong holiday whereupon we celebrate the second century BCE victory of the Jewish zealots of Judea over the Jewish secularists of Judea, and give our children iPods, Legos and Nerf guns to commemorate our inexhaustible capacity for internecine violence and stupidity. But some other Jewish zealots — modern zealots — recently enjoyed another victory, a huge victory, just one month ago, a victory that I believe is worth noting.

Jerusalem — In an apparent about-face on a deal hammered out earlier this year among Israel’s Interior Ministry, the Jewish Agency and the Chief Rabbinate, an Orthodox convert whose conversion took place in New York was threatened with expulsion from Israel, The Jewish Week has learned.

Jerusalem — A cartoon in the newspaper Yisrael Hayom shows three men in white robes standing in a street in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. They are staring at two signs: one says “Women” with an arrow pointing left, the other “Men” with an arrow pointing right.

Seeing the robed men on their street, one chasid tells another, “The Muslim Brotherhood has come here to learn from us.”